Run With the Hunted (48 page)

anyhow, it's raining tonight,

one hell of a dashing, pouring

rain....

very little to do.

I've read the newspaper

paid the gas bill

the electric co.

the phone bill.

it keeps raining.

they soften a man

and then let him swim

in his own juice.

I need an old-fashioned whore

at the door tonight

closing her green umbrella,

drops of moonlit rain on her

purse, saying, “shit, man,

can't you get better music

than
that
on your radio?

and turn up the heat …”

it's always when a man's swollen

with love and everything

else

that it keeps raining

splattering

flooding

rain

good for the trees and the

grass and the air …

good for things that

live alone.

I would give anything

for a female's hand on me

tonight.

they soften a man and

then leave him

listening to the rain.

I've come by, she says, to tell you

that this is it. I'm not kidding, it's

over. this is it.

I sit on the couch watching her arrange

her long red hair before my bedroom

mirror.

she pulls her hair up and

piles it on top of her head—

she lets her eyes look at

my eyes—

then she drops the hair and

lets it fall down in front of her face.

we go to bed and I hold her

speechlessly from the back

my arm around her neck

I touch her wrists and hands

feel up to

her elbows

no further.

she gets up.

this is it, she says,

eat your heart out. you

got any rubber bands?

I don't know.

here's one, she says,

this will do. well,

I'm going.

I get up and walk her

to the door

just as she leaves

she says,

I want you to buy me

some high-heeled shoes

with tall thin spikes,

black high-heeled shoes.

no, I want them

red.

I watch her walk down the cement walk

under the trees

she walks all right and

as the poinsettias drip in the sun

I close the door.

I reached up into the top of the closet

and took out a pair of blue panties

and showed them to her and

asked “are these yours?”

and she looked and said,

“no, those belong to a dog.”

she left after that and I haven't seen

her since. she's not at her place.

I keep going there, leaving notes stuck

into the door. I go back and the notes

are still there. I take the Maltese cross

cut it down from my car mirror, tie it

to her doorknob with a shoelace, leave

a book of poems.

when I go back the next night everything

is still there.

I keep searching the streets for that

blood-wine battleship she drives

with a weak battery, and the doors

hanging from broken hinges.

I drive around the streets

an inch away from weeping,

ashamed of my sentimentality and

possible love.

a confused old man driving in the rain

wondering where the good luck

went.

here comes the fishhead singing

here comes the baked potato in drag

here comes nothing to do all day long

here comes another night of no sleep

here comes the phone ringing the wrong tone

here comes a termite with a banjo

here comes a flagpole with blank eyes

here comes a cat and a dog wearing nylons

here comes a machinegun singing

here comes bacon burning in the pan

here comes a voice saying something dull

here comes a newspaper stuffed with small red birds

with flat brown beaks

here comes a cunt carrying a torch

a grenade

a deathly love

here comes victory carrying

one bucket of blood

and stumbling over the berrybush

and the sheets hang out the windows

and the bombers head east west north south

get lost

get tossed like salad

as all the fish in the sea line up and form

one line

one long line

one very long thin line

the longest line you could ever imagine

and we get lost

walking past purple mountains

we walk lost

bare at last like the knife

having given

having spit it out like an unexpected olive seed

as the girl at the call service

screams over the phone:

“don't call back! you sound like a jerk!”

I know a woman

who keeps buying puzzles

Chinese

puzzles

blocks

wires

pieces that finally fit

into some order.

she works it out

mathematically

she solves all her

puzzles

lives down by the sea

puts sugar out for the ants

and believes

ultimately

in a better world.

her hair is white

she seldom combs it

her teeth are snaggled

and she wears loose shapeless

coveralls over a body most

women would wish they had.

for many years she irritated me

with what I considered her

eccentricities—

like soaking eggshells in water

(to feed the plants so that

they'd get calcium).

but finally when I think of her

life

and compare it to other lives

more dazzling, original

and beautiful

I realize that she has hurt fewer

people than anybody I know

(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).

she has had some terrible times,

times when maybe I should have

helped her more

for she is the mother of my only

child

and we were once great lovers,

but she has come through

like I said

she has hurt fewer people than

anybody I know,

and if you look at it like that,

well,

she has created a better world.

she has won.

Frances, this poem is for

you.

 

I saw Sara every three or four days, at her place or at mine. We slept together but there was no sex. We came close but we never quite got to it. Drayer Baba's precepts held strong.

We decided to spend the holidays together at my place, Christmas and New Year's.

Sara arrived about noon on the 24th in her Volks van. I watched her park, then went out to meet her. She had lumber tied to the roof of the van. It was to be my Christmas present: she was going to build me a bed. My bed was a mockery: a simple box spring with the innards sticking out of the mattress. Sara had also brought an organic turkey plus the trimmings. I was to pay for that and the white wine. And there were some small gifts for each of us.

We carried in the lumber and the turkey and the sundry bits and pieces. I placed the box spring, mattress and headboard outside and put a sign on them: “Free.” The headboard went first, the box spring second, and finally somebody took the mattress. It was a poor neighborhood.

I had seen Sara's bed at her place, slept in it, and had liked it. I had always disliked the average mattress, at least the ones I was able to buy. I had spent over half my life in beds which were better suited for somebody shaped like an angleworm.

Sara had built her own bed, and she was to build me another like it. A solid wood platform supported by 7 four-by-four legs (the seventh directly in the middle) topped by a layer of firm four-inch foam. Sara had some good ideas. I held the boards and Sara drove home the nails. She was good with a hammer. She only weighed 105 pounds but she could drive a nail. It was going to be a fine bed.

It didn't take Sara long.

Then we tested it—non-sexually—as Drayer Baba smiled over us.

We drove around looking for a Christmas tree. I wasn't too anxious to get a tree (Christmas had always been an unhappy time in my childhood) and when we found all the lots empty, the lack of a tree didn't bother me. Sara was unhappy as we drove back. But after we got in and had a few glasses of white wine she regained her spirits and went about hanging Christmas ornaments, lights, and tinsel everywhere, some of the tinsel in my hair.

I had read that more people committed suicide on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day than at any other time. The holiday had little or nothing to do with the Birth of Christ, apparently.

All the radio music was sickening and the t.v. was worse, so we turned it off and she phoned her mother in Maine. I spoke to Mama too and Mama was not all that bad.

“At first,” said Sara, “I was thinking about fixing you up with Mama but she's older than you are.”

“Forget it.”

“She had nice legs.”

“Forget it.”

“Are you prejudiced against old age?”

“Yes, everybody's old age but mine.”

“You act like a movie star. Have you always had women 20 or 30 years younger than you?”

“Not when I was in my twenties.”

“All right then. Have you ever had a woman older than you, I mean lived with her?”

“Yeah, when I was 25 I lived with a woman 35.”

“How'd it go?”

“It was terrible. I fell in love.”

“What was terrible?”

“She made me go to college.”

“And that's terrible?”

“It wasn't the kind of college you're thinking of. She was the faculty, and I was the student body.”

“What happened to her?”

“I buried her.”

“With honors? Did you kill her?”

“Booze killed her.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Sure. Tell me about yours.”

“I pass.”

“Too many?”

“Too many, yet too few.”

Thirty or forty minutes later there was a knock on the door. Sara got up and opened it. A sex symbol walked in. On Christmas Eve. I didn't know who she was. She was in a tight black outfit and her huge breasts looked as if they would burst out of the top of her dress. It was magnificent. I had never seen breasts like that, showcased in just that way, except in the movies.

“Hi, Hank!”

She knew me.

“I'm Edie. You met me at Bobby's one night.”

“Oh?”

“Were you too drunk to remember?”

“Hello, Edie. This is Sara.”

“I was looking for Bobby. I thought Bobby might be down here.”

“Sit down and have a drink.”

Edie sat in a chair to my right, very near to me. She was about 25. She lit a cigarette and sipped at her drink. Each time she leaned forward over the coffee table I was sure that it would happen, I was sure that those breasts would spring out. And I was afraid of what I might do if they did. I just didn't know. I had never been a breast man, I had always been a leg man. But Edie really knew how to
do
it. I was afraid and I peeked sideways at her breasts not knowing whether I wanted them to fall out or to stay in.